The gold standard for tender parental support in tennis was established by
Mary Pierce’s father Jim, who once gently counselled his daughter from the
stands: “Go on, Mary, kill the bitch.”

And the talk of Wimbledon has once again alighted upon meddling mums and disruptive dads, living vicariously through the prowess of their young.

No sooner had Laura Robson stepped off Court No 1 after her vanquishing of Maria Kirilenko than her phone pinged with eight text messages from mother Kathy. “She always texts me during matches,” she admitted, with the type of exasperated sigh only a 19-year-old girl could muster. “Generally it’s about my ball-toss.”

Elsewhere Bernard Tomic was almost in tears as he dwelt upon father John’s ban from the All England Club’s premises for allegedly butting his son’s doubles partner. “It would be amazing just to have him here, as a father and a coach,” he said of a man still to face trial for grievous bodily harm.

The intensity and complexity of the player-parent relationship here is like no other in professional sport. Even 32-year-old Lleyton Hewitt is trailed around at every turn by his dutiful folks, while Roger Federer’s mother and father, Robert and Lynette, are present to survey Lord RF of Basle as he bears down upon a record eighth Challenge Cup.

Their demeanour is so placid, so ineffably Swiss, that one suspects their pulse rate seldom rises above that of their son’s Rolex watch. But for more combustible characters among the elder generation, the tension of observing their progeny on court reaches visceral extremes. Mike Bryan, winner of 14 grand slam doubles titles with brother Bob, recalls hearing a loud noise as they lost a crucial point during one US Open match and looking up to see their father kicking seven bells out of a defenceless chair.

Tomic Snr has proved a notorious culprit in the theatrical anger stakes, too, finding himself ordered off court for calling foot faults on one of young Bernie’s opponents. But the most spectacular exhibitions of rage still belong to Damir Dokic, the unhinged father of poor Jelena and infamous in the Nineties for smashing a journalist’s mobile phone to pieces at Wimbledon, as well as being forcibly ejected from Flushing Meadows for protesting at the price of salmon in the players’ restaurant. All this was mere embroidery, though, on his threat to drop a nuclear warhead on Australia.

Mr Dokic, mercifully, has been consigned to the lunatic fringe, but plenty of other agitated parents risk becoming immersed in their offspring’s battles to an unhealthy degree. Robson’s mother was not even at Wimbledon for the Kirilenko victory, being engaged at home to look after the family Labradors, but still could not resist a technical dissection by text.

There comes a point, surely, in any young player’s life when it is time to flee the nest, to experiment with competing outside the piercing scrutiny of over-zealous family members, and yet the apron strings in tennis can prove surprisingly difficult to cut.

Sabine Lisicki, a former Wimbledon semi-finalist, is an ardent believer that the family connection can help create a comfort blanket. One of the many in the women’s draw hot-housed throughout adolescence at Nick Bollettieri’s academy in Florida, she argues that “as a girl, it’s much better to have somebody from the family with you – lots of girls travel with their coaches and they miss home so, so much”. Perhaps this is true. Perhaps all impressionable sports prodigies on their travels would be happier if they remained clasped to the family bosom.

It is difficult, for example, to imagine David Warner whacking Joe Root in the face if his mother had been on hand to make him a packed lunch.

But supposed 'pastoral care’ on tour can just as easily be pernicious. For one questions whether the ubiquitous parents in tennis are adopting their near-obsessive interest for the right reasons.

There is an inescapable suspicion that some of them are operating from no more noble motive than to experience their lives anew through their children, coveting the glamour that the highest echelon of the game can bring. Or as motormouth Jim Pierce put it: “Maybe I’m trying to live my youth now. Mary is like a finely-tuned sports car. Well, I built the Ferrari and now I want the keys back.”

John Tomic could be accused of investing the same unrealistic hopes in his son, still only 20 years old but forced in every press conference to field questions about an errant dad.

It would be salutary for him to remember that his job is not to harangue, or to plague, or to posture in some kind of reflected glory, but to remain essentially and exclusively a parent.